Olive Kitteridge - Elizabeth Strout [52]
But there was a shout from down the hall. A man shouting, coming closer, and it was the quick thrust of a booted foot kicking over the chair that swept her into the black of terror. A tall man holding a rifle, wearing a big khaki vest with pocket flaps. But it was the mask he wore, a Halloween mask of a pink-cheeked smiling pig, which seemed to pitch her forward into the depths of ice-cold water—that ghoulish plastic face of a pink smiling pig. Underwater she saw the seaweed of his camouflage pants and knew he was shouting at her but couldn’t hear his words.
They made her walk down the hall in her bare feet and papery blue robe while they walked behind her; her legs ached and felt enormous, like big sacks of water. A shove behind smacked into her, and she stumbled, clutching her papery robe as she was pushed through the door of the bathroom she had been in. On the floor with their backs against the separate walls sat the nurse and the doctor and Henry. Henry’s red jacket was unzipped and askew, one of his pant legs caught halfway up.
“Olive, have they hurt you?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said the man with the smiling pink pig face, and he kicked Henry’s foot. “Say another word and I’ll blow your motherfucking head off right now.”
A paint splotch of memory that quivered every time: the sound of the duct tape behind her that night, the quick stripping of duct tape from its roll, and the grabbing of her hands behind her back, the wrapping of the tape around them, because then she knew she was going to die—that they would, all of them, be shot execution style; they would have to kneel. She was told to sit, but it was hard to sit down when your hands were taped behind you and your head inside was tilting. She had thought: Just hurry. Her legs were shaking so hard, they actually made a little slapping sound against the floor.
“Move, you get shot in the head,” Pig-Face said. He was holding the rifle, and he kept turning quickly, while the flaps of his vest bulged, swinging when he turned. “You even look at each other, and this guy shoots you in the head.”
But when did the things get said? Different things got said.
Along the exit ramp now were lilac trees and a red berry bush. Olive pulled up at the stop sign, and then almost pulled out in front of a car passing by; even as she looked at the car, she almost pulled out in front of it. The driver shook his head at her as though she were crazy. “Hells bells to you,” she said, but she waited so she wouldn’t end up right behind someone who had just looked at her as though she were crazy. And then she decided to go in the other direction, heading the back way to Maisy Mills.
Pig-Face had left them in the bathroom. (“It just doesn’t make sense,” different people said to the Kitteridges soon after this happened, after they read about it in the paper, saw it on TV. “It doesn’t make sense, two fellows barging into a hospital hoping to get drugs.” Before people realized the Kitteridges were not going to say three words about the ordeal. What does “making sense” have to do with the price of eggs, Olive could have said.) Pig-Face had left them, and Blue-Mask reached for the doorknob, locking it with the same click sound it had made for Olive not so long before. He sat down on the toilet seat cover, leaning forward, his legs apart, a small, squarish gun in his hand. Made of pewter, it looked like. Olive had thought she would vomit and choke on the vomit. It seemed a certainty; being unable to move her bulky, handless self, she would aspirate the vomit that was on its way up, and she would do it sitting right next to a doctor who wouldn’t be able to